Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Her Majesty’s Furniture: The Jouy-en-Josas Upholstery Fabric, 1785

Furnishing Fabric
French, 1785
The Victoria & Albert Museum
We all know that I like toile. I come from a family of toile-lovers actually and a visit to our homes proves that.


Grape harvests were popular among the pastoral scenes which were printed on cotton toile textiles in the late Eighteenth Century. This example in red on white was printed at the factory established in 1760 by Christopher-Philippe Oberkampf (1738-1815) at Jouy-en-Josas--a village located between Paris and Versailles, the main residences of the French court at the time.

These products were printed with copper plates and their crisp patterns caught the attention of the French elite. Oberkampf’s firm was so highly regarded that Louis XV named it a Royal Manufacture.

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